Kadiatou
In the morning, in dawn’s diluted light, woke up to a sense of loss, knowing Papa was already gone.
She tried to wake early, just to see him leave, but she was always too late, waking to a room sour with sleep, hearing the rise and fall of her brothers’ and sisters’ breaths.
Sometimes, at bedtime, she pulled at her fingers and her cheeks, to chase sleep away, but she never succeeded, and would wake up startled to have fallen asleep, knowing he was gone because of the bluish light slanting through the wooden shutters.
It always reminded her of loss, that stillness after dawn but before morning was fully revealed.
One day she asked him why he left so early, in the dark, and he said the mine was very far away, where he worked peeling gold from the stomach of the earth.
She imagined him climbing down a pit, the walls studded with shimmering gold nuggets, more beautiful than the earrings her grandmother, Nembero Joulde, had welded to her ears.
Binta said it wasn’t like that at all: Papa and the other men hadn’t even found gold, and if they did it wouldn’t shine like earrings yet.
Binta was right, Binta knew things, but still imagined Papa descending slowly while turning from side to side to behold the radiance of gold.
If he left them for long stretches of time, then it had to be because he was toiling at something remarkable, worthy of his exhaustion.
He always came home sagging from fatigue, black dirt under his fingernails, grunting as Mama massaged his back.
But all he needed was a good night’s sleep before his tiredness disappeared.
In the morning, he wore his good boubou that was free of frayed hems and went to the mosque and visited friends, and chatted with the neighbors in the yard.
He scooped up little boys in his long lean arms and threw them high up in the air and then caught them and swung them around, their laughter ringing in the air.
He ate his supper while all the children watched and waited for the storytelling that followed his meal.
His folk stories always began with song.
The children gathered closer and sat at his feet, the baby crawling up and down and between the legs of his chair.
Mama puttered around, shelling groundnuts and telling him one detail was wrong, and it was not men who told stories, anyway, and another detail was wrong, and he would tell her to come and tell the story herself and she would say he might as well continue since he had already started, and they would laugh.
In the flickering light of the kerosene lamp, an enclosing lulling warmth surrounded them all.
He told stories of cows and hyenas and magic snakes, of vampires that turned into fireflies, and of how the world began with a giant drop of milk.
He made faces and changed his voice, gesturing and clapping.
Sometimes his words were so drawn out, like a child’s early babble, that they all burst into laughter before the story’s end.
sat against the wall, looking at his feet in his leather slippers so firmly on the ground.
Her small feet looked just like his, flat without an arch.
As the last story ended and they began singing a song, sorrow gathered at the edge of her mind, knowing he would leave again before sunrise.
—
Years later, Mama told her she always clutched at Papa’s legs on the nights before he left, so tightly that they pleaded with her to unclasp her hands.
She did not remember this.
Binta showed her a picture of a man wearing a boubou and a hat and said Papa’s hat had looked like that.
But she did not remember Papa’s hat; she did not remember him even wearing a hat.
The older she got, the more her memories were slippery in her hands.
Even his face felt further away, like an image drawn in fading lines.
But she remembered the day he didn’t come home, the fleeting gust of coolness outside, and the scent of the first rains of the season, of water touching parched soil.
Papa didn’t come home because he died, in a rock slide, in the old gold mine.
They said he shouted a warning to the other men before the rocks rained down, trying to save others, even in his peril.
pressed her ears shut to keep those stories away.
It should have been the other men who were left in that mine, trapped and crushed by rocks.
It should not have been Papa.
She wept herself limp, her body wrung out of tears, until she fell into unrestful sleep.
In violent dreams she saw the rocks dislodged in a storming rush, so many rocks crashing down, enormous rocks, and his body a helpless target, mere flesh and bone.
By the time he was finally brought out, he did not look like a person.
Or so their cousin Bhoye said.
None of them saw Papa before he was buried but Bhoye said nothing of Papa was left whole.
Nothing of Papa was left whole.
Those words tormented her.
She imagined Papa’s body becoming sand, but it did not feel true, or right, and she wept and wept.
Binta said Bhoye was lying; he was too slick, always making up stories, his eyes flashing in that insincere face.
Every Eid, when they went to the village and all the children gathered to eat, it was Bhoye’s fingers that selfishly snaked through the communal bowl of namma in search of fish, before it was time to share.
“Kadi, he is lying.
Papa looked like a person,”
Binta said.
“Papa looked like himself.”
heard, in the firm spine of Binta’s voice, how determined to comfort her Binta was, to comfort them all.
When condolence visitors came, Binta suspended her own sobbing to present a face unstained by tears, a testimony that the roof over their lives had indeed collapsed but they would survive still.
Binta.
Binta was born dreaming, always talking of other places, other worlds, where girls went to school and clean water gushed from taps.
She walked in quick steps, as if holding back an enormous hunger eager to burst free; she did everything fast, she quivered with the restlessness of unhatched dreams.
Her eyes and her heart had already traveled the paths of her future.
You looked at Binta and wondered what she would become, for become something she must, and it was not a question of if but when.
loved her as one loves sunlight.
She sat content in Binta’s charmed shadow, happy in the backstage of Binta’s desires.
Girls going to school seemed a waste to , learning books instead of learning how to keep a home, but she said yes when Papa asked, “And what of you, Kadi? Do you want to go to school, too?”
She said yes for Binta, because of Binta, Binta who was always asking Papa to send them to school, while Papa smiled and said they were too precious to him, and girls became spoiled in Western school.
But Papa didn’t stop Binta from looking at their neighbor Idris’s school books; she would sit on the steps outside, the books on her lap, turning page after page, her eyes lingering on each.
Idris told stories of school and Binta listened, enraptured.
One day Idris said his teacher beat a student for speaking Maninka, because only French was allowed in school.
Idris demonstrated the beating, laughing and chopping at the air with his hand, saying the student had urinated on himself.
Binta nodded and laughed along, but was taken aback; she waited until they were alone to say, “How can we go to school, Binta? We don’t speak French.”
“We will learn in school,”
Binta said.
was unconvinced; how would they learn a language they did not speak, in a place where they could not speak the language they knew? But she said nothing.
Later, Binta said that going to school would change their lives.
Once they learned French then they could earn money translating letters from French to Pular, and they could live in a better place, not in one room in a crowded yard.
They would not have to rush out early to dip their buckets into the well before the water turned brown from being disturbed.
They would not have to use a general latrine that was always moist, always dark.
Complaining about their life had never occurred to , a life she thought comfortable; the latrine was better than going out in the open field with tsetse flies circling about, the well better than trekking to a stream, but Binta’s dreams glimmered as she dreamed them, and listened, entranced, wishing them to come true, for her.
If only those evil rocks had not rained down, Binta said, Papa would have finally agreed to send them to school; he was only waiting until the mine yielded gold.
Now Bappa Moussa wanted them to move to the village, miles from any Western school, saying they would never go hungry, because nobody ever went hungry in a Fula village, there was always something to eat.
At the mention of the village, Binta tightened into a knot of refusal.
She said Bappa Moussa just wanted more hands to work on his farm, after all they were not starving here in the township, and hadn’t Mama managed for years to feed them from her yogurt trade?
“You know we have to obey Bappa Moussa,” said.
Of Papa’s seventeen brothers, Bappa Moussa was the eldest.
He spoke in a muffled mumble, as if pools of water were stored in his mouth.
When looked into his eyes, she saw the world reflected back at her, as a frightening place that frightened him.
For no reason, he would often mutter, “They will send people to kill you and nobody will talk.”
Binta said the government had killed some Fula people and closed their businesses, including the transport company where Bappa Moussa had worked.
“But it happened a long time ago and he should have found another job by now,”
Binta said, and said nothing, afraid of speaking ill of an elder, their new family head.
So resistant was Binta to village life that a wild idea sprouted in her mind:
she would go to Conakry and live with Mama’s sister Tantie Fanta.
’s mouth fell open.
Conakry! The center of it all, the faraway other world where stories were made.
Going to live there at a young age felt too big and brazen a plan, even for Binta.
—
In urgent whispers, Binta told Mama she could go to school there and after school she could work as a trader’s assistant, and soon she would be able to send money home.
Mama said Binta had to be patient, stay in the village for a while, appease Bappa Moussa, but Binta asked and asked, pushing and needling, until Mama said she should not mention Tantie Fanta or Conakry again.
For all the years they lived in the village, Binta’s spirit circled above, never landing, waiting until her real life could begin with Tantie Fanta in Conakry.
When Tantie Fanta came to the village, her visits turned days into ceremonies.
Magical Tantie Fanta, slender and small, her skin like sheer gauze, letting light in.
She brought them sardines and packaged cheese and fresh loaves of bread.
The car always stopped at the village square because the path to their house was too narrow, and and Binta ran to Tantie Fanta and struggled for who would slip her handbag off her shoulder and hold it as they walked up to the house.
never really struggled; she let Binta hold it.
Tantie Fanta’s presence was enough, her arms around their shoulders, talking to them, asking them questions.
She smelled of the city, of perfume and metal, an intoxicating, intimidating scent.
Binta said that it was the smell of beautiful avenues lined with trees where if you strained hard as you walked past you heard pampered children playing the piano.
Not that Tantie Fanta lived in such a place, that knew, because Tantie Fanta was a secretary in the government ministry.
watched how Tantie Fanta’s long fingers grasped food, her relaxed hair, shiny and thin-stranded, the glitter of her gold necklace, her dress belted slimly at the waist, her red fingernails.
Binta watched too, but differently, not admiring but absorbing, to mimic what she knew she could become.
She would become even more, thought, and it made her happy, imagining Binta in the future, her nails red and her hair straight, coming back to see her, bringing sardines and bread for her children.
—
Binta did not demand it of her, but wished that she, too, disliked the village, as an act of solidarity.
But she liked its unhurried, untroubled air, and the evening gatherings in the square, children playing with an abandon so foreign in town.
The loud frogs at night during the rains, the long humid days, the tall termite hills like giant mushrooms along the path, the whisper of the waterfalls not far away.
She liked to shoo the chickens in at dusk, to gather with her siblings and cousins around the communal bowl, chattering and eating fonde and namma, licking tiny stray grains of fonio from their lips.
Their grandmother, Nembero Joulde, watched them from her small wooden bed, with her prayer beads and bag of kola nuts, blinking as she chewed.
Her wizened beautiful face alert to every child, every movement, every wandering goat and chicken.
thought kola nuts were sweet until one day their grandmother went to the mosque and Binta took one kola nut from the bag and bit into it.
“Very bitter,”
she said and spit it out.
Binta’s word was enough, did not taste it.
“Binta, next time you want to eat kola nut, tell me,”
Nembero Joulde said when she came back.
Binta laughed.
“How did you know?”
Nembero Joulde shook her head as if children were out of control these days.
But there was a twinkle in her eyes, a light only Binta’s mischief could bring.
It was there, too, in Mama’s eyes, the day Binta and climbed a tree.
On the way back from an errand to their aunt Yaaye’s house, Binta said to , “Let’s climb this tree.”
“But girls don’t climb trees.
What if someone reports us?”
“Nobody will.”
“We’ll fall,” said.
“And we’ll get up,”
Binta said.
It was a hardy acacia, branches spread like welcoming limbs.
The day was dazed by sunlight, and hitched up her skirt and climbed behind Binta, her heart beating fast, scared to be stepping outside of her own careful lines.
She stopped at a forked branch while Binta climbed higher.
She could see the sloped roofs of the village spread below, and farther in the distance, the majestic valley bathed in the moody vapors of mist.
She had actually climbed a tree, she was on top of a tree, she was aloft above the earth.
How exhilarating, to discover that she could overcome the boundaries she had set for herself.
Later, as she made her way down, she was pleased to have climbed but knew she would never do so again.
They were not sure who told Bappa Moussa.
He scolded them, and said they would bring shame to the family, behaving like uncouth girls.
said she was sorry, while Binta looked at him, glum and silent.
And so said sorry again and again, to make up for Binta’s silence.
It reminded her of when the village chief passed them by, greeted him with respectful lowered eyes while Binta gazed directly at him, making bow even deeper, as if in compensation.
knew how to shrink herself in the presence of her betters, but Binta didn’t even know she had natural betters.
Later, Binta said to Mama, “I can even climb higher than Bhoye,”
and Mama, spreading out hibiscus petals on a mat, laughed with twinkly eyes and said, “Binta!”
knew Mama loved her, for being dutiful and dependable, but sometimes, secretly, she wished Mama loved her as she loved Binta, for being free.
—
The first time cooked ndappa and folere for the family, Mama tasted it, surprised, and said she was so young and already her sauce was perfect, just the right amount of wateriness for the tang of the hibiscus.
“Your father loved folere,”
Mama said.
“Do you remember?”
“Yes,”
said, unsure she remembered.
They had not lived in the village with Papa, there was nothing here, no chair or tree or smell, to prod a memory alive.
Yet she felt him close, his presence and essence, because he had grown up here, long before she existed, and he, too, had pulled grain stalks from the damp soil and walked past huts with calabashes nailed to their doors.
She was living the life he once lived.
She saw him in the young boys splashing around at the shallow end as she washed clothes in the river.
He had worked in his Nembero Joulde’s vegetable garden; now she weeded and watered it, fed the soil with kitchen scraps and manure from the animal pen.
His specter hung even over her cooking.
Sifting dry fonio comforted her in an unusual, almost spiritual, way, her fingers sunk in the tiny grains, a warming feeling, disappearing and emerging again.
She sliced okra and plucked sour leaves and pounded cassava, instinctively knowing that she would not love it so much if she had not started cooking here, with her mother, close to where his own mother had cooked.
“Kadi cooks so well, she will make a good wife, and she has not yet been cut,”
Yaaye said to Mama.
“It is not too late,”
Mama said defensively.
They were outside shelling groundnuts and Mama threw down a shell in a quick, irritated movement.
“Their age-mates here have all been cut,”
Yaaye said.
Later, Binta asked Mama, “What really happens when you are cut?”
“Stop asking,”
Mama said.
On the day they were cut, thought, They are going to cut us today, but they did not tell us that they are going to cut us today.
It happened in the rainy season, in their grandmother’s hut.
The air smelled of damp, of mildew sprouting in the outhouse.
Mama woke her and Binta, shaking them gently, shadowy figures moving about.
Mama and the aunties were talking in whispers.
Blue-black early, no roosters crowing, and smoke from the stove in the corner.
Mama held down, pressed firm on the mat, while her aunt Nenan Mawdo bent between her legs.
In Nenan Mawdo’s hand, the razor blade was warm from boiling water.
It must have been sharpened over and over to quickly slice through human flesh.
felt the metal’s warm touch and then the pressure against her skin before the exploding pain.
She was shocked that she had been cut, so shocked she made no sound.
Such painful pain.
Her head felt like a whole waterfall trapped in a shell.
Binta was screaming while the aunties told her to be quiet, to be brave, to be a woman.
“Mama, you are wicked!”
Binta shouted.
“Mama, you are cursed! How can you do this to us?”
Mama was hushing, comforting, padding a rag soaked in herb juices between their legs.
The rag stung, like a hundred insect bites all at once.
was floating up above the ground, her weight gone, all substance drained out of her.
Mama’s face morphed into the gleaming face of a magic snake, and stared, too flattened even to scream, until the features softened and became Mama’s face again.
A throne appeared, hanging still in the air.
Hot peppers were spread on its seat, and the throne began to shake from side to side, and then to spin, red peppers flying in the air.
“Kadi, Kadi,”
Mama said.
“You want some water?”
tried to say no but her tongue had dissolved in her mouth.
An aunty said, “Leave them to rest.
In a few days they will not even remember it.”
Another aunty said, “I remember mine.
Pus was coming out.
I smelled so bad.”
It was days before could look fearfully down at herself, her lower body felt detached, a thing apart, no longer hers.
Every day, Mama cleaned them, singing softly and caressing their legs.
Always, Binta squirmed away from Mama.
“You did not tell us,”
she said, her tone accusing.
“You did not tell us what was going to happen to us.”
But alone with , Binta said, “They had to cut us because if they don’t, then we can’t marry.”
“Yes,”
said.
Mama and the aunties had said so, too, but from Binta’s mouth, the words brought calm, ’s shock slowly fading.
“We have to get our periods first,”
Binta said.
did not know the details of periods, but she knew old women went to the mosque because they no longer had their periods, and young women could not go if they had their periods, and you needed a period to have your children and girls could get married as soon as their periods came.
dreamed of marrying her cousin Tamsir, and having seven children, and selling yogurt, so she looked forward to her period.
Binta’s came not long after they were cut, heavy dark blood full of clots like pieces of raw liver, and for a few days Binta lay writhing from pain.
Binta pulled up her skirt to show the menstrual cloth folded in her underwear, and reared back, slightly repulsed.
Her own period confused her when it came, utterly painless, a simple announcement of blood, and she wished for pain, because hers felt wrong, like an imitation, while Binta’s was real.